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Theatre review: The House They Grew Up In at the Minerva, Chichester

Deborah Bruce searches for the meaning of home in her compassionate new play

Sam Marlowe

July 24 2017, 12:01am, The Times

A beleaguered duo: Daniel Ryan as the autistic Daniel and Samantha Spiro as his sister PeppyJOHAN PERSSON

★★★★☆You can calculate the market value of a house, but how do you put a price on a home, with all its ghosts, its family history, the decades of memories that have seeped into its walls? And, in a consumerist society bedazzled by glossy property porn and bedevilled by the housing crisis, are we in danger of judging our flesh-and-blood neighbours with no more humanity than we eye up bricks and mortar?

Deborah Bruce’s new play offers a through-the-keyhole insight into the domestic world of a pair of ageing, reclusive siblings, misfits in a desirable southeast London postcode, and we witness the heart-rending fallout when the hard-nosed, self-interested 21st-century comes knocking.

As a piece of writing, it’s something of a fixer-upper; it could do with…